Cedric and the Revolution is an entertaining graphic adventure, using the Adventure Game Studio engine in which you play a character in a Medieval kingdom attempting (and failing) to rouse the masses to protest at the excessive level of taxation by the King.

It's cheerfully off-kilter, in a Luscasarts mold, albeit there are some fairly silly puzzles (crabs crush coffee beans, but hammers do not, apparently). But there's a walkthrough should you find yourself at an impasse. No spoken dialog, no sound effects, and pixellated 320x240 graphics, but not bad at all, really.

Everybody Dies is a short, sharp interactive story -- with illustrations. It's got lots going for it, and it just took third place in the yearly interactive fiction competition. You should definitely play. But what I want to talk about here is its departure from the usual form.

Everybody Dies is not, of course, the first IF game to use pictures: games back to the commercial era have featured drawings or photographs (more or less skillful) of major locations. More recent hobbyist IF has branched out from the idea that illustrated IF should be equivalent to a point-and-click adventure with words, as well. Robb Sherwin's Fallacy of Dawn and Necrotic Drift use photographs of actors (well, Sherwin's friends and family, I think) to portray major characters, whose dialogue and actions are the strong points of his work already. Stephen Granade's Arrival is illustrated with charming, child-like pictures and diagrams that suit the perspective of the game's young protagonist. Neil K. Guy's Six Stories presents beautiful photos of objects interspersed with the game's text; they are often isolated on white so that it looks as though they're lying on the surface of the screen. The effect is elegant and contemplative, and heightens the sense (already present in the model and presentation of much IF) that individual things have potent significance. Ekphrasis, an underplayed French game by JB, is all about art, and intrigue, and it uses its illustrations to show the player the paintings in question, together with characters and some important objects. Images layer on top of one another as the player learns more, creating dynamic collages very appropriate to the layering of plots and counterplots.

Everybody Dies does none of those things. Most of the illustrations (stylized drawings, by the excellent Michael Cho) replace the text during certain dreamlike sequences. They accomplish something that text could not. They present metaphor, rather than exposition. They hint at something elusive, subjective, even spiritual, without being treacly or heavyhanded. They make the shape of the narrative clearer, because their internal logic tells the player when the story is still unfolding and when things are drawing towards an end. It is impossible to imagine the same story being nearly so effective without them -- and they could not have been recast as words.

I find this fascinating. I have been thinking for a while that IF needs to explore ways to change registers in order to achieve its full potential as a medium. Many other media alternate between low-intensity, "normal" ways of presenting information (the dialogue in a musical, e.g.) and high-intensity, stylized, subjective ways (the song and dance numbers). Cinema has a broad range of effects -- tricks of lighting, uses of music, rapid cutting, unusual lenses, handheld camera work -- to hint at the subjective experience of the onlooker instead of an objective reality. Interactive media struggle a little bit to do this, though. One way to change the flow is the cut-scene, which in interactive fiction is just a long block of pre-composed, uninteractive text, but it tends to alienate players and lose power by excluding participation just at the moments when the story becomes most personal or most powerful. This is not a new problem.

Most of my thinking on this topic has involved shifting to a different way of using the text, and perhaps changing the interface a little to make it suitable to different content. Maybe interactive interior monologue implemented like NPC conversation, only with oneself as the interlocutor. Maybe something closer to hypertext, where the player picks keywords to think about issues. Maybe real-time sequences, where the player watches a train of thought go by and intervenes when he wants to change where it's going. Maybe all of the above, in different games. However we do it, we need more ways to break out of the level where interaction is all about handling objects, because object-manipulation is usually just not rich enough or subtle enough to express complex emotional decisions. There have been a lot of attempts in IF to handle emotional content metaphorically in text through surreal landscapes. A few of them have worked, though they've mostly worked through great abstraction and obscurity (see So Far). Most have been, in my opinion, dismal, hokey failures. I worry that most of my ideas for solving this problem would also come off heavy-handed.

I can't say Everybody Dies has solved the subjectivity problem completely. Its illustrations are elegant and powerful, but in most sequences the player cannot interact with them other than to hit a key to request the next one. For this particular game, that works fine, though. And it makes a powerful case for why multimedia interactive fiction can be something other than a tedious Myst wanna-be.

He's done it again, Paolo Pedercini has made a fun, polished, punk-positive satire, but this time instead of focusing on a particular industry or scandal, he's taking a broad-view of a world economy driven and chained by oil. In Oiligarchy you play the CEO of an international oil company, drilling your way to riches and dominance. I've been looking forward to this game since Paolo mentioned it to me at Games for Change in June, he told me "the better you are at the game, the worse you'll do."

Unlike some of the major releases this year, this game lives up to its promise.

Pedercini and his Molleindustria-l posse deliver the same cocktail of production value mixed with social commentary; everything from the framing of historical events as covert operations to the clanking music of the derricks puts this game over the top aesthetically. The main success here, however, is in the design of the system, it sets a new benchmark for model complexity and implicit argumentation, just as The McDonald's Game did in 2006 and Operation: PedoPriest tried to do in 2007. Like McDonald's, this game will be played by tens of millions, already hitting two million unique plays within it's first week - this is persuasive media, this is the new mass entertainment, this is the new conversation platform.

I did a review for JIG that covers the basics, the comments there are entertaining. You know those pictures of mammals turning into apes, then hominids, then homosapiens? The comments there may remind you of that picture. Paolo completes the strip toward modern man with his postmortem, where he does the analysis of his own game that I probably would've done here. Instead, I'm about to take us into transhumanity.

So, Paolo's model is pretty good and based off real data and history, at least to the extent that those things are real. Let's start by putting on our meta-programming hats and examine the Godelian gap between Paolo's worldview and the game. Paolo thinks oil prices are correlated to supply, and that the run-up and subsequent collapse in prices are due to free market forces, which he is critical of. If you look at some other data, however, this axiom seems flawed. If you understand the mechanics, the literal equations and algorithms, by which markets price assets, then these patterns are by-definition self-fulfilling prophecies, buying begetting more buying and selling sparking more selling. Futures contracts in oil are financial derivatives that can move due to financial demand, irrespective of actual supply and demand of oil. The majority of volume in those markets come from Hedge Funds and the like borrowing up to fifty times their reserves to buy contracts that will never be settled with physical delivery of any kind. The clincher is that the recent strength of the dollar was literally a conspiracy between the Japanese, Euro and US central banks to buy a bunch of dollars, get the Hedge Funders to flip their positions, and then the collapse of Lehman (which they signed off on) triggered the rest (stock market meltdown, artificial demand for dollars to settle Credit Default Swaps).

While critics of the Bush administration and their ilk across the aisle might see the oiligarchy model as being all-inclusive, those critical of the entire secret government horror-show might want to include a few more variables that aren't preoccupied with picking on "The Free Market". The Free Market is a straw man myth perpetuated by people who had already bought the government with the creation of the Federal Reserve, by having the middle class believe in an invisible hand we ignore the men behind the curtain - free markets generally only exist in villages and college dorm rooms. I could make a game out of this worldview, that monetary oligarchy is a deeper form of control than oiligarchy, and use the same strategy as Paolo. I could put you in the role of the technocratic/fiat money elite, using what I call "phantasm" and Paolo describes as "Challenging Meaningful Play". What we mean is: you take pure agency and spike it with the psychological warp of finding yourself altered in a non-trivial way by monstrous decisions and/or unexpected consequences. In my game, you could use renewable energy to maintain the same kind of hierarchical status that reigned during the oil age, and you would manipulate positive feedback loops in markets instead of negotiate the negative feedback loop of oil depletion.

But, maybe we can do better...

What if had something like Metaplace but for procedural rhetoric? What if we let people build and alter arguments and models? It's like two wicked design problems for the price of one, but if you consider that monetary systems, energy systems, social systems, legal systems, and so forth, are all at the least game-like clusterfucks if not outright games, then it might be worth it to let people construct models that are literally applicable and also lead by example. This is a way to have your cake and it eat too, explore contradictory models like the current facade of a free market capitalist system, while also doing more than just complaining - without falling into the trap of "simulated activism" that leaves you satisfied without having actually done anything.

This game has proved a few things, at least to me:

• you can tackle complex subjects quite effectively without using too many CPU cycles
• you can make such games fun and appealing to a wide audience
• you can make such games for very little money in short time periods
• there is definitely a place for punk satire of this type
• there is also a place for inductive gameplay that transcends satire and encourage the emergence of new models

If we get to this high goal that I'm setting, it'll be because we stood on the shoulders of snarky Italian giants.

The story of Rithmomachy is extraordinary; once considered the most intellectually compelling game of all, even more so than Chess, played by men of learning across central Europe, and rivalling Chess for popularity, it gradually lost appeal, and by the eighteenth century, had entirely disappeared, except as described in moldering tomes.

The origins of the game are a matter of conjecture; some have claimed origin in Ancient Greece, but this seems unlikely (and the notion is probably predicated on the mathematical nature of the game). Parlett believes it originates sometime in the 11th or 12th century, but an earlier origin is conceivable, since the rules of the game are closely related to the Pythagorean numerology of Boethius, a Christian philosopher of the 6th century, best known for his work De Consolatione Philosophiae (On the Consolation of Philosophy).

Indeed, for its players in Medieval times, the numerological aspect of the game must have been one of its main appeals; keep in mind that, in the period, mathematics was prized less for practical reasons (e.g., applicability to science and engineering), than for its beautiful regularity and depth and therefore its ability to cast light on the nature of the mind of God. Thus, a student of Chess was merely someone striving to master a game, but a student of Rithmomachy would be engaged in pursuit of the divine mysteries -- as well as striving to master a game, of course.

Unfortunately, while there are a number of descriptions of the game, none agree on the precise rules, and it is likely that there were many variations in different places and at different times. But we do know some things:

It was played on a double-sized checkerboard, that is, one 8x16 squares in extent. One player (white) had pieces with numerical values deriving from even numbers, and the other (black) from odd numbers. Each had eight round pieces, represented as circles, four containing the even or odd numbers between 1 and 9, the other containing their squares (thus, white had 2, 4, 6, 8, 4, 16, 36, and 64; black had 3, 5, 7, 9, 9, 25, 49, 81). Each had eight triangular pieces, four of them based on the the "original" numbers times the next number numerically, and the other four the square of "the next number numerically." Thus, white has 6 (2x3), 20 (4x5), 42 (6x7), and 72 (8x9), and also 9 (3x3), 25 (5x5), 49 (7x7) and 91 (9x9). Similarly for black, but starting with the odd numbers as base. Each also had eight square pieces, derived from more complicated equations (2 m squared, minus m; and n plus m squared together -- where n represents the base numbers of each side, odds or evens, with m the next number sequentially).

To complicate things, white's 91 piece is omitted and instead constructed of a pile of six pieces (rounds 1 and 4, triangles 9 and 16, and squares 25 and 36); black's 190 is similarly constructed of other pieces (round 16, triangles 25 and 36, squares 49 and 64). These composite pieces are called pyramids.

Pieces are set up on either side of the board in a set pattern similar to that from the screenshot above; in some versions, they do not begin at the outermost rank of squares, but two squares toward the center of the board.

As in Chess, players alternate moves. Rounds move one square; triangles two; and squares three. You may not move fewer squares than indicated by the piece's shape, and intervening spaces must be vacant. The pyramids may move as permitted by any of the shapes that constitute the pyramid -- but since pieces may be removed from the pyramid during play, if all pieces of a shape have been lost from the pyramid, it may no longer move as appropriate for that shape.

Different sources vary on the nature of movement, however; for example, Selenus says that rounds may move forward only, triangles only orthogonally, and squares and pyramids in any direction; while Illmer says that rounds may move backward or forward, but only orthogonally, triangles only diagonally, and squares and pyramids in any direction. (Other versions are known as well.)

And now for the truly arcane piece: There are several methods of capture. The simplest is by blockade -- my pieces are situated in such a way that one of your pieces has no legal moves, ignoring the presence of your own pieces.

More important (and common) is the arcane rule that if one or two of my pieces are capable of moving to the square occupied by one of your pieces, and either one of them alone, or two of them in combination, have some mathematical relationship to your piece, I may capture it. Thus, let us call your piece B, and my pieces A1 and A2; I can capture your piece if any of the following is true:

1. A1 or A2 = B
2. A1 + A2 = B
3. A1-A2 = B
4. A1 * A2 = B
5. A1 / A2 = B
6. If the three pieces form an arithmetical progression, with B in any order in that progression -- that is, the difference between any pair divided by the difference between the other pair is one
7. If the three pieces form a geometrical progression, with B in any order in that progression -- that is, if the difference between any pair divided by the difference between the other pair is equal to the ratio between the smallest and middle numbers
8. If the three pieces form a harmonic progression, with B in any order in that progression -- that is, if the difference between any pair divided by the difference between the other pair is equal to the ratio between the smallest and largest of the numbers

What's interesting about this is your ability to capture is realistically based on your ability to do math in your head.

In addition, a single piece can capture an enemy piece if it that piece is in the first piece's permitted direction of movement, there are no intervening pieces, and the distance times the first piece's value equals the second piece's value -- or, contrariwise, if the first piece's value divided by the distance equals the second piece's value.

If you can make more than one capture on your turn, you may make all.

Unfortunately, sources also vary on what 'capture' means: in some cases, the piece is removed; in others, the piece is flipped over, where it has the same number in the other player's color, and either left in situ or re-entered by the new owner at his board edge.

Also, it is possible to capture individual component pieces within a pyramid -- or the pyramid as a whole.

There are also a whole slew of different victory conditions in different works; the Wikipedia article linked above lists several.

The reason for Rithmomachy's decline and disappearance can only be conjectured; Parlett suggests that as mathematics lost its mystical connotations and became perceived as a practical tool, it lost its fascination for players -- and that, also, players came to realize that the game was more complex than but without the strategic depth of Chess.

If you want to give the game a try, the shareware Ambush, linked above, is a Rithmomachy variant -- unfortunately, not a particularly faithful one. Game Cabinet also provides a translation of the Boissiére rules, which date from 1556.

Update: Apparently, a British company will sell you a nicely made wooden set of the game for a cool 115 quid. I'm tempted. Okay, not very.

From the maker of ROM Check Fail comes a parody of Little Big Planet that subverts the gameplay as well as the nameplay -- like a lit'ol something I did when I was high.

How does it subvert the gameplay? Instead of offering analog control of platform/object physics manipulation, it offers one single verb -- jump -- which executes no matter which arrow key you push. From that, however, is startlingly good gameplay, where your skate-boarding shit-punk escapee avatar (Crap Boy) uses timing to make the most of the environment and build crazy momentum. I don't know if there's enough depth to it to keep up an episodic series, which is what the blog format the game is embedded in seems to imply, but whatever, it's pretty good as is. I'd take out a leveraged derivatives bet that Farbs was just playing with the user-created content lovefest fetishism that Sony is trying to rake with LBP -- if only Goldman Sachs would sell it to me (I've got a peso coin on my desk here, how much notational value could I get if I put that down?).

Because the gameplay subversion works, the aesthetics come tumbling forth like an enema of freedom. You are breaking out of the pirate ship you've previously called home, making play out of it, turning its black and white stark-scape into a skate-park. The music gives the pacing due diligence, and the speed cannot be denied. Giddy like Bart Simpson yet somehow slightly relevant.

Between is the latest full game from Jason Roher, done in his idiosyncratic style of OpenGL cross-platform and bit-wise read .tga files. The game requires you to play with a friend, and generally plays with your expectations of multiplayer interaction. At first you'll experiment with the controls, trying to get an idea of what it's all about, as you do you'll begin to create new patterns, building a great structure in a multiverse between dreams and waking life. As you do a sense of creeping solitude is fuddled by the strange adjustments to the landscape, things you did not plan, and the sense that the person you had to network with as a requisite for starting the game is lurking around like the Christian God or a more mischievous sort of invisble man, depending on the level of altruism. You then realize that Instant Messaging functions as both a philosophical sutra and a transhuman sort of prayer.

The puzzle seems logical and yet complete mastery of the mechanics eludes the rational thinker - you need to think outside your own models and include the ineffable chaos of another person's mind in order to build your tower of babel. Even so, after you catch on to the big clue that the join code you dropped into Gtalk was just the precursor to an interesting conversation, the mysteries may allude you. I had this experience with Tembac, he described the game as a "pretentious Yoshi's Cookie". That comment, while accurate, clued me in to the notion that a big motivation for dismissing a game as pretentious is when it is designed to confuse as well as teach. To me that's not pretension, that's clever mischief, and maybe the bitter icing of another sort of lesson. Results may very depending on the level of hilaritas you possess.

As usual with Roher's work, there will be a small legion of aesthetes hailing the nuances and newly broken ground in this game, and there will be the proportionally larger crowd typing "Fail". But what's significant about this game is that it gets you to talk with someone as you experience an odd melange simultaneously. It's cheaper than buying four hits of acid (two for me, two for you) and the purity is verified.

The Line Continues is a little game that looks like it might have come out of the demoscene. Little is the operative word; the screenshot is full size. To get the best experience, you're well advised to change your screen resolution to 640x480 before playing.

You are running along a yellow line that is gradually disappearing behind you, and if the disappearing end catches up with you, you die. Monsters come at you, which you can destroy by "yanking" on the line -- the monsters, like you, are extentions of the line into the second dimension. Other attackers can be avoided by flipping under the line (down arrow key) or turning yourself into a balloon floating over the line (up arrow) -- but if you spend too long as a balloon, you pop. Some attackers kill you, but others simply cause you to lose time, unable to run for a few seconds while the end of the line gets nearer.

Meanwhile, some excellent bouncy techno-pop plays. A very simple structure, but quite unlike anything else I've seen, and really quite fun. I'd love to have this game on my cellphone -- it's the kind of short-play timewaster that would be great in that environment.

Indeed, quite...

Paul has the scoop on this. It's quite indicative of what I just was inspired to call "The Content Trap", which is to game development as the metrics trap is to social engineering. Extremely aesthetic, visionary even, like that painting is melting and the walls are breathing visionary - and yet barely playable.

Trailer, then walkthrough: